Sushi-making lesson

Laura was given a sushi-making lesson as part of her birthday gift from work. The course was at Samsi, in Spinningfields, a new branch in the family of the best Japanese restaurant chain in Manchester. We arrived, and were sat in front of My Neighbour Totoro until ate our starter arrived: miso soup; vegetable gyoza; chicken yakitori. Lovely!

The lesson began with a description of how sushi rice is prepared and cooked. The properties that this imbues the rice with – stickiness most of all – are essential for making sushi. Sushi rice is short and fat, like pudding rice, or risotto rice. We learned how to wet our hands when handling the rice: enough that the rice wouldn’t stick too much, not so much that the rice balls would fall apart.

We started with cucumber maki, spreading rice over the seaweed, adding the filling, and then rolling it up using a mat (maybe made of bamboo?). Next up were avocado and salmon California rolls, inside out maki with more rice, and more filling. Much the same process as the maki, but for some reason – my own clumsiness? – I managed to leave a big piece of salmon hanging out of one end. Oops! Laura’s California roll was much neater. Clearly she had the hang of it far better than me!

The size of the rice blocks for our nigiri also caused me a few issues – I kept making them far too big. That’s my greedy guts getting me into trouble again! We made a pair of salmon nigiri each, and then one with tuna. I struggled with getting the salmon to stick to the top of the rice. “If you hold the fish too long, the temperature of your hand starts to cook it,” said the instructor. Blimey!

We finished with two cone-shaped temaki, one with avocado and salmon, and one with cucumber. The wrapping for this was all done in hand, rather than with a mat. We smeared rice on part of the nori, added the fillings diagonally, then tucked in and rolled up the cone, sealing it with a little sticky rice. The avocado and salmon temaki looked like a bouquet of pink flowers.

To wrap up, we chopped and prepared the maki and California rolls, and laid them on the plate. The finishing touch was to sculpt a leaf from wasabi paste to decorate the plate. I was terrible at this, and ended up settling for a quasi-diamond-ish lump. Laura’s leaf was much better.

“How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Japanese?” Laura asked me.
“I think it’s arigato gozaimasu, but I’m not sure of the pronounciation, nor of the etiquette around bowing.”
“Okay. We’ll just say it in English then,”

As for the taste? I loved it. And Laura? “I liked making it, but I don’t really like eating sushi.”